Heart Attacks have Beginnings……and how best to get to these Beginnings is our Challenge

EHAC Progress Report Ray Bahr MD Shahriar Dadkhah MD

(1)- EHAC or Community Outreach was initially Key Element 8 in the Chest Pain Center Strategy to provide Early Heart Attack Care. Because of its importance, it was moved to Key Element No.1 to place more Emphasis on the Awareness of early chest symptoms that was needed both in the Community as well as with Employees within the Hospital.

(2)- www.DeputyHeartAttack.org is an Internet based standardized program that teaches about early heart attack symptoms, followed by a test that when passed allows the individual to become deputized and take an Oath to act when confronted with a person having early symptoms.

(3)- The Accreditation Team has been working very closely with New Hospitals to promote the EHAC program and I follow up with a telephone call to the Contact Nurse to provide additional suggestions The reason that we added Hospital Employees to the Community Outreach was to help staff understand the purpose of their Chest Pain Center and to become ambassadors for it in their offtime.

(4)- To measure our performance, we worked with the IT department and added an EHAC Counter on the web site to track the number being deputized. We started this about 9 months ago and at the Congress,we had about 20,000 deputized. We had projected about 100,000 by the end of 2013….. as of Sept.25, we have 120,000 EHAC Deputies.

(5)- EHAC education is now required for All Hospital Employees in Cycle IV. This is now made easy in that the EHAC Teaching Module can be added to the HealthStream Competency Training that has courses for each hospital requirements. With a 400 bed hospital, there are about 3000 Employees. Each hospital is required to do EHAC education in the community …..another 2000 EHAC Deputies…..for a total of about 5000 EHAC Deputies for each New Accredited Hospital.

(6)- Cycle V will be introduced at the next Congress in April,2014 and we expect to have over 1000 Accredited Chest Pain Centers within a year after that.

Doing the Math for an additional 200 New Chest Pain Centers,

200 CPCs times 5000 EHAC Deputies/ Hospital equals at least One Million EHAC Deputies

(7)- Observation Services Discussion Working with the American Heart Association,CMS,hhs,CDC

(8)- Power of an Idea whose Time has come……in further getting out the EHAC Message.

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